There is presently a need to provide advanced solutions to the emerging eBusiness paradigm. In the eBusiness paradigm, sources and formats of information/services are of secondary importance compared to the need to leverage such information and services. The goal of eBusiness is to provide solutions that will increase business value to organizations. Increased business value is attained, for example, through leveraging existing IT investments in technology and infrastructure, leveraging business application investments, and maintaining and expanding existing business opportunities with existing and new clients through the intelligent utilization of business data generated by these relationships.
The eBusiness paradigm presents a challenge where the boundaries between the different components and technologies in a business environment have to be either eliminated or made to work together. Furthermore, while trying to succeed in this challenge, IT and business professionals also have to focus their resources on creating an opportunity to implement and execute the strategy that is most suited for their particular business organization.
Current business management systems are typically reactive in nature and utilize an enterprise application integration (EAI) environment, which provides the ability to commonly represent data and identify business events. However, with the increasing diversity of both the business environment and the technology that drives it, IT and business professionals need to feed business critical information to a common computing environment in order to effectively manage their business.
In addition, the present methods and systems for processing business data are not sufficient to enable businesses to take full advantage of the available business information. Specifically, there is not presently a method or system that identifies and generates business events utilizing the disparate available sources of potentially relevant business information. Further, the current methods and systems cannot adequately propagate identified business events to components that are interested in the identified business events. An additional shortcoming of current business methods and systems is the inability to analyze business events from a reactive, proactive and predictive perspective.